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Short abstract:

Exploring science and animal eradication in Patagonia, this talk analyzes how humans and other-than-humans respond to each other at necropolitical sites, revealing complex time-making dynamics.

Long abstract:

Since 2008, a Chilean-Argentinian initiative with global funds has aimed to eradicate all Canadian beavers from Tierra del Fuego. Introduced in the 1940s to replicate Euro-American landscapes and fur industries, such projects sought to accelerate progress through techno-environmental whitening (Dicenta 2023). While the archipelago's cycles of innovation/abandonment have contributed to the Anthropocene, the beaver's adaptation places them as the main drivers of subantarctic forests' change since the Holocene. Prompting a reconsideration of anthropocentrism, the "Castorcene" draws attention to the politics of animal world-making (Dicenta and Correa 2021).

In this presentation, I zoom into the eradication project to analyze how trappers, researchers, beavers, and other-than-humans respond to each other at necropolitical sites. Such analysis reveals two complex time-making projects: A) Haunting temporalities articulated by ghostly, injured beavers haunting life-scientists as well as by ghostly humans haunting beavers whose behaviors are more influenced by the memory of North American colonial terror than by habitat quality. B) Eradication temporalities: The project enforcement of speed and expansion to prevent beavers' learning and adaptation clashes with field practices where caring for beavers' suffering articulates slow, placed-based, and intimate rhythms. In the labs, an excess of beavers' corpses-turned-into-samples has enabled prominent research in a peripheralized institution.

Drawing from extensive fieldwork, I aim to raise critical questions about more-than-human temporalities, asking for ways to stay with relational approaches that help us be cautious with the ontologization of time and communities.